


Glut

by Cumvore, Slither-the-least (baeberiibungh)



Series: Periphery [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: AUish, Gen, Memories, Mind Palace, Shades/Ghosts/Something, rarepair
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-21
Updated: 2016-08-21
Packaged: 2018-08-10 05:42:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7832554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cumvore/pseuds/Cumvore, https://archiveofourown.org/users/baeberiibungh/pseuds/Slither-the-least
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They no longer are because they were never meant to be…</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glut

Hannibal did not believe in ghosts. If there were any such supernatural beings, conjured not from the psychedelic fluid running through the brain, some shade of his parents might have come screaming and raging after the fiends that ate his sister. There would have been a whole glut of them surrounding Hannibal while he feasted on his newest victims, pointing fingers at him and rattling their bones that Hannibal had stripped clean, calling him inhuman, and if ghosts were all that was left of one’ soul, then Hannibal’s soul must have been a harking dark beast content to thrash and destroy in the dark. . But no one appeared. Not then, not now. Hannibal did not believe in ghosts at all.

However, there were days, shaded evenings more likely that Hannibal would go deep down memory lane, stroll the halls of his memory palace and see Mischa running about, tumbling down small steps with her stubby feet and drool shining the pout of her lips as she played with her toys with an industrious look on her face. Hannibal could see the blue and yellow ribbons in her hair like how his mother use to tie it with many pins that pulled Mischa’s downy hair to the side. And she would call to him, words still a jumble of sounds formed by a tongue that still has not learned to roll the way it is supposed to. Her hands so small in his when she pulled him along to join one of her games.

So, no, Hannibal did not believe in ghosts, but every time he came back from an intense flashback, he would see Mischa in the periphery of his vision. Hear the clear tinkle of her voice. Smell the baby smell of powdered neck and toffee sticky hands, and Hannibal would shake. She would feel so real, and Hannibal still did not quite believe in ghosts, but Mischa was maybe an exception.

After the thing with Will and Margot and Mason and Bedelia, when Hannibal walked into a prison on his own, eyes fixed on Will and a smile gracing his lips, Hannibal started seeing Mischa again. Perhaps it was because he spent so much of his time in the memory palace itself, which held her echo like a fresh flower in bloom. Her laughter roused the air in every part of his palace, made Hannibal remember how he used to love another thing, another being too. When Alana would come by, rapping on the glass case with her cane, Hannibal would come to the present, but Mischa came with him too, like a talisman of his happy place ever present, always with Hannibal as she had been when alive.

But another shade followed her now. It was what Hannibal presumed a boy, with soft curly hair and eyes he had seen before, on the earnest face of one Will Graham. This one never met Hannibal’s eyes too. He just latched on Mischa’s small frock and follow her all around and Hannibal was amused beyond words. Mischa, so tiny and small, leading around another smaller child with it’s thumb in his mouth and eyes on the back of Mischa’s head. Hannibal knows that there was a funeral, after Mason was dead, in a coffin two feet long. Will did not go, nor was he expected to. But Hannibal assumes that the stillborn, human inside its swine incubator, must have looked quite a lot like the curly haired cherub following Mischa.

It certainly spoke something about Hannibal’s obsession with Will that even his unborn child resided in his memory palace, someone who Hannibal built a face, a body, a space for in an infinity that does not truly exist. Hannibal looked on at Mischa and the boy, the unnamed and unloved boy roam around the expanse of his mind and Hannibal just felt contentment. If not Will then perhaps Will’s son for company.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. Kudos and comments please.


End file.
